Summer is Over, School Begins in August | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

At this time of year, journalists and bloggers write about the new fact of schools starting before the first weekend of September, the traditional start time for U.S. schools for nearly a century. A few writers (and parents also) ask why the date for the end of summer vacation keeps creeping backward into August (see here,here, and here). Answers include increased teacher efficiency (more time to prepare students for standardized tests), catering to students and families (smoother closing of first semester before Xmas and getting out of school in late May which reduces graduating seniors’ shenanigans in last few weeks of school), while preserving other vacations during school year such as in February and April.

Current talk about shorter summers, however, is empty of the highly-charged, crisis-ridden vocabulary of 30 years ago about U.S. students spending far less time in schools than international peers who were beating the pants off Americans on tests. In the 1980s, the short school year of 180 days was believed to be the cause of U.S. students’ mediocre showing on international tests. Recommendations for a longer school year (up to 220 days) came from A Nation at Risk (1983) and Prisoners of Time (1994) plus scores of other commissions and experts. In 2008, a foundation-funded report, A Stagnant Nation: Why American Students Are Still at Risk, found that the 180-day school year was intact across the nation. The length of the school year even with current earlier starts in August today remains around 180 days of school.

What about year-round schools? There is a homespun myth, treated as fact, that the annual school calendar, with three months off for both teachers and students, is based on the rhythm of 19th-century farm life, which dictated when school was in session. Thus, planting and harvesting chores accounted for long summer breaks, an artifact of agrarian America. Not so.